Looks at the power of conversation for changing everything from personal relationships to organisational dysfunction, and then suggests conversation starters for meaningful discussions.

A bestseller--more than 300,000 copies sold, translated into seventeen languages, and featured in the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Miami Herald, Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, and Fortune; Shows how discoveries in quantum physics, biology, and chaos theory enable us to deal successfully with change and uncertainty in our organizations and our lives; Includes a new chapter on how the new sciences can help us understand and cope with some of the major social challenges of our timesWe live in a time of chaos, rich in potential for new possibilities. A new world is being born. We need new ideas, new ways of seeing, and new relationships to help us now. New science--the new discoveries in biology, chaos theory, and quantum physics that are changing our understanding of how the world works--offers this guidance. It describes a world where chaos is natural, where order exists ''for free.'' It displays the intricate webs of cooperation that connect us. It assures us that life seeks order, but uses messes to get there.Leadership and the New Science is the bestselling, most acclaimed, and most influential guide to applying the new science to organizations and management. In it, Wheatley describes how the new science radically alters our understanding of the world, and how it can teach us to live and work well together in these chaotic times. It will teach you how to move with greater certainty and easier grace into the new forms of organizations and communities that are taking shape.

On the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of her classic Leadership and the New Science, bestselling author Margaret Wheatley once again turns to the new science of living systems to help leaders persevere in a time of great turmoil. I know it is possible for leaders to use their power and influence, their insight and compassion, to lead people back to an understanding of who we are as human beings, to create the conditions for our basic human qualities of generosity, contribution, community and love to be evoked no matter what. I know it is possible to experience grace and joy in the midst of tragedy and loss. I know it is possible to create islands of sanity in the midst of wildly disruptive seas. I know it is possible because I have worked with leaders over many years in places that knew chaos and breakdown long before this moment. And I have studied enough history to know that such leaders always arise when they are most needed. Now it's our turn.

The acclaimed author “richly articulates how the insights of modern science . . . can usher in a new era of human and planetary health” (Systems Thinker). For years, Margaret Wheatley has written eloquently about humanizing our organizations and helping people to work together more effectively and compassionately. She has shown how breakthroughs in chaos theory and quantum physics can enable organizations to function more like responsive, self-organizing living systems, rather than cold mechanisms of control. And she has gradually expanded these ideas into the wider arena of human society. In short, Margaret Wheatley is one of the most innovative and influential organizational thinkers of our time, and Finding Our Way brings together her shorter writings for the first time, touching on all the topics she has addressed throughout her career, showing how she has applied the ideas in her books in many different situations. “However,” she writes, “this is not a collection of articles. I updated, revised, or substantially added to the original content of each one. In this way, everything written here represents my current views on the subjects I write about.” Provocative, challenging, at times poetic, and often deeply moving, Finding Our Way sums up Wheatley’s thinking on a diverse scope of topics from leadership and management to education and raising children in turbulent times; from societal commentary to specific organizational techniques and more. “Wheatley provocatively lays out how managers must operate to be effective in a system that is ‘alive’ . . . Finding Our Way challenges us to see the enterprises we lead in new light.” —Leader’s Beacon

This is an era of increasingly complex problems, fewer and fewer resources to address them, and failing solutions. Is it possible to find viable solutions to the challenges we face today as individuals, communities, and nations? This inspiring book takes readers on a learning journey to seven communities around the world to meet people who have “walked out” of limiting beliefs and assumptions and “walked on” to create healthy and resilient communities. These Walk Outs who Walk On use their ingenuity and caring to figure out how to work with what they have to create what they need. In India, we meet people from Shikshantar, a community that is rejecting the modern culture of money, with its emphasis on self-interest and scarcity, in favor of a gift culture based on generosity and reciprocity. In Zimbabwe, we discover the capacity people have to adapt and invent new ways of surviving and thriving in the face of total systems collapse. Through essays, stories, and beautiful color photographs, Wheatley and Frieze immerse us in these communities that are accomplishing extraordinary things by relying on everyone to be an entrepreneur, a leader, an artist. From Mexico to Greece, from Columbus, Ohio, to Johannesburg, South Africa, we discover that every community has within itself the ingenuity, intelligence, and inventiveness to solve the seemingly insolvable. “It’s almost like we discovered a gift inside ourselves,” one Brazilian said, “something that was already there.” “This book gives insight and beauty to the new world beyond consumerism and all of its side effects. Written with poetic and reflective grace, it is an intimate journey through communities that are creating a future with their own hearts, hands, and relationships.” —Peter Block, author of Community and coauthor of The Abundant Community The Enhanced Edition includes 25 minutes of animation, video, and audio. The animation shows the “Two Loops Theory of Change” with a voiceover from co-author Deborah Frieze. Three videos show inspirational “Walk On” communities in Brazil, South Africa, and India. This edition also includes the “Walk Out Walk On” theme song. Margaret Wheatley cofounded and led the Berkana Institute, a global foundation that partners with people developing healthy and resilient communities. Deborah Frieze succeeded her as Berkana’s president and created the Berkana Exchange with many of the people described in this book. Margaret is the author of several books, including Leadership and the New Science, A Simpler Way, Turning to One Another, Finding Our Way, and Perseverance.

Meetings in the round have become the preferred tool for moving individual commitment into group action. This book lays out the structure of circle conversation, based on the original work of the authors who have standardized the essential elements that constitute circle practice.

"We want life to be less arduous and more delightful. We want to be able to think differently about how to organize human activities." So begins A Simpler Way, an exploration of a radically different world view that will reshape how we think about organizing all human endeavor. Margaret J. Wheatley and coauthor Myron Kellner-Rogers explore the question: "How could we organize human endeavor if we developed different understandings of how life organizes itself?" They draw on the work of scientists, philosophers, poets, novelists, spiritual teachers, colleagues, audiences, and their own experience in search of new ways of understanding life and how organizing activities occur. A Simpler Way presents a profoundly different world view that can change how we live our lives and how we can create organizations that thrive. A Simpler Way explores fundamental new beliefs about organizations and life. Like Leadership and the New Science, this new book is rooted in science but breaks new ground by developing insights from literature, spiritual teachings, and direct experience. The authors challenge many assumptions about life, organizations, and change, while providing inspiration and guidance for readers on their own journey to a simpler way to organize their endeavors. The authors describe a new paradigm of life as self-organizing and coevolving, drawing on sources that support modern science but predate its findings by thousands of years. They examine five major themes-play, organization, self, emergence, and coherence-each grounded in both the science and philosophy of a world that knows how to organize itself. Each theme is explored in depth, and then applied to how we think about human organizations. The book begins and ends with photo essays, providing visual imagery that recalls readers to their own experience with a world that is creative, playful, and self-organizing. Written in a relaxed, poetic, and inviting style, the book welcomes the reader into this exploration of a new way of being in the world, one which can give us increased organizing capacity and effectiveness with less of the stress that plagues us now.